India Plans Mandatory Facial Recognition for Airport and Airline Staff

India’s government plans to require facial recognition screening for airport and airline employees, linking biometric checks with a digital airport-entry pass system as officials introduce additional aviation security measures.

Rajesh Nirwan, director general of the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security, said the entry-pass portal would be entirely digitally controlled. Integrating passes with facial recognition is intended to reduce queues at airports where employees and passengers use the same entrance, he said.

Airport-entry passes are currently issued as physical cards to staff working across airports and airlines. About 1.5 million are issued each year, with security personnel checking the identification of workers entering and leaving airport premises. The proposed system would add facial screening to that staff-access process.

Officials outlined the measures after a reported cockpit attack on a Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. The security changes also include accelerating the installation of full-body scanners at eight major Indian airports for passenger screening.

Civil Aviation Secretary Samir Sinha said scanner equipment had been delivered to three airports, with the other five expected to receive it soon. The ministry is collecting and analyzing data from the devices. Equipment delivery and the planned expansion are separate from the proposed facial-recognition requirement for employees.

The staff-access proposal concerns credentials used by airport and airline personnel. India’s passenger-facing Digi Yatra program uses facial recognition for a different process: moving enrolled travelers through participating airport checkpoints. The employee requirement is not a change making Digi Yatra enrollment mandatory for passengers.

Nagpur Airport recently removed the boarding-pass scan from its Digi Yatra entry flow, allowing registered travelers to enter through face verification. Passengers still need to register and link their boarding pass in the application before using the service; removing a scan at the gate does not remove those enrollment steps.

Digi Yatra has also expanded the documents available for enrollment by adding driving licences obtained through DigiLocker. That change gives participating travelers another verified identity option alongside Aadhaar. The newly proposed staff system would address the airport-entry passes issued to workers, while the existing passenger program continues to manage enrolled travelers’ biometric access.

Sources: The Economic Times

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By the ID Tech Editorial Team